I am writing this as a passionate fan of your games, in particular Stick Arena. I quit being a part of the community several times in the past few years, only to come back each time because of how much I care about Stick Arena and the friends I have that still play it.

This isn’t just about me; it is also on behalf of the community. I am happy to report that the Stick Arena community has had a significant resurgence in recent months, which has been done primarily through the use of Discord. I would like to credit Meteor the most for galvanizing this movement through his Stick Arena Discord server (click here to view his post about it). As of my writing this, his server has gathered 174 members. There are also several other important Discord servers, such as “Stick Arena All-Stars” founded by grasp85, “Thunder Clan” founded by myself, “The Cozy Hangout” founded by Rey, “Abyss Clan” founded by Try, and “European Task Force” founded by Lizbona. Through Discord, we have been able to bring back old players, attract some newcomers, and unite them all onto a platform that makes communication about Stick Arena events convenient and efficient. I can say for certain that the Stick Arena community is not going anywhere any time soon, and that it has been improving nonstop for the past several months.

From what I can see, we Stick Arena players see no reason to stop our momentum. We collectively want to push the game forward, giving back to a game that gave us all so much in our childhoods. There is much potential in many aspects of the game. You can play it as an open sandbox to create fun maps for Free For Alling. You can climb the ranking leaderboards with hammer maps. You can create and experiment with new game modes: Capture The Flag, Search and Destroy, and more. You can join playdays to try to win some free prizes. You can take Stick Arena competitively to see who the best player is. And we players see this potential, hence why we continue to play Stick Arena into 2020, almost 15 years since the original version’s launch date.

While we the Stick Arena community will continue to play and build on what we have as much as possible, we hope you notice the changes that we are trying to make and consider giving some thought to helping us continue with Stick Arena. Specifically, there are a couple of issues I hope can be considered in the near future:

Accessibility to New Users
One thing that concerns me moving forward is how hard it is for a brand new user to latch onto the bulk of the Stick Arena community and their events. In particular, a new user who finds Stick Arena probably would not know about these forums, the leaderboard system with bimonthly prizes, how to join in playdays and tournaments, and the Discord communities. Now, I understand that a part of this has to do with the volume of players in the lobby, which while at times can be of decent size, is very inconsistent depending on the time of day. However, it would be great if the startup message when one logs into Stick Arena can be updated with some information about the forums, playdays and tournaments, leaderboards, and Discord servers such as the official XGen Discord server among others. While we as a community can try to do better to catch new players, I think some help from the Developer side in helping new users know about the latest would go a long way!

Bringing Classic version to Steam
Currently, the Dimensions version of Stick Arena has been ported to Steam, which is amazing and allows people to still play Stick Arena after the end of Flash in web browsers in 2020. However, there are still many players including myself who use the Classic version of Stick Arena for competitive Stick Arena. Every tournament in Stick Arena for a long time has been held in Classic, not Dimensions. Classic is considered the competitive standard for Stick Arena; it has a smaller field of vision, introducing a more fun metagame that requires more cerebral map awareness and discourages camping too comfortably. Check out my Thunder Clan 1v1 Tournament YouTube playlist to see some Classic gameplay.
As such, we Classic players want to reliably play in Classic beyond 2020. Currently, many of us use Flash-based Classic clients off the XGen website that may last beyond 2020; however, new computers will probably not support these clients. There are plans to host more tournaments in Classic in the year of 2020; we hope to grow these as much as possible and demonstrate the need for Classic as an important part of Stick Arena.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read all of this. Happy Holidays, and here’s to a great 2020 for XGen Studios!

Well said Red, I like how you constructed a plan to help navigate new comers and those that return in an unifying way to help promote activity and fun among-st players! I also want to thank you for your compliment as well.

By making it easier for players who are unfamiliar with the terrain to assimilate into the community and possibly fall in love with the game just as much as us. We can ensure that we can have a long lasting community with players returning. By promoting the forums and discords, it is very clear that they are more likely to stick around due to them seeing a community. Bringing the game to Steam will also help as users on there can find the game as well.

If I may mention, adding more opportunities for players that are less fortunate during playdays to win prizes will almost benefit those who are trying to better themselves at the game and promote them to play more. The same concurrent users are accumulating a lot of prizes and this is disheartening for those who are simply not as fortunate as those who are winning currently.

Thank you for also being considerate of the situation and I hope those old and new will find a place back into our community or make room for themselves. I believe if all things fall into place accordingly if we all work together, 2020 may actually be a really good year for a game that we never expected to take off like it has recently. The greater question remains, “What will it take?”

I would just like to point out that it would be good if you would (as in steam version) make the web version same with only 4 servers (Europe, 2-Dimensional Central, Paper Thin City and Sticktopia)… That way people don’t need to switch between all the servers to find players…

The game is also still very pay to win, and without a lot of players in the community, I think we should make it a little more fair for people who don’t have a lab pass. And, (for all the uri players out there) I would want to see the kill limit go up to 60, and maybe some more stuff that comes with lab passes.